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On the price of things

Some time ago I understood that the real price for anything is not the one we pay when buying the actual thing. Real price is the price for the “usage” of an item during a unit of time.

It is convenient to use per day price as a measure of this. For instance if you buy an iPhone for 600 euros and use it for 500 days your per-day-price would be 1,2 €. So to use your iPhone every day you pay 1,2 euros.

Consequently the longer you use the item, the cheaper it is. I used my old phone (Sony Ericsson K600) for 5,5 years. The resulting price of using it was around only 8 cents a day. When you start thinking in terms of a per-day-price, you would undoubtedly find many interesting examples in your life.

The phone I used the longest

With such arithmetic in mind, it is easy to evaluate what is worth paying more for and what is not. Like 1000-euro wedding rings over 40 years of use will result in a tiny 5 cent daily price, but a cheap Chinese tablet breaking in a couple of months would cost much more.